I’m an alien. But I’ll write this as though I were a human being. This is a blog about the relationship between human thought and machine learning. Specifically, about identifying patterns in human thought that might then be able to be identified by a machine. The vehicle for doing this…
Repetition and Generalization
First Principles Are there any concepts that could be of use in suggesting how machine learning could understand and convey meaning? I think there are: repetition and generalization. I may be wrong about this. In the words of the great Philosopher Charles Barkley, I may be wrong, but I doubt…
How Might a Human Machine Think?
How Might a Human Machine Think? In a Kaggle competition on distracted driving, the dataset consisted of images of drivers who either were or weren’t engaging in distracting activities. Rachel Thomas warns against “…overfitting to particularities of those specific people, and not just learning the states (texting, eating, etc). (emphasis added)”…
Generalization
Current AI really isn’t mimicking the brain, other than in name. “Neural networks” are indeed networks, but they really have very little to do with neurons. The general idea of an ‘activation function’ comes from neurons, but in AI it just means “if the aggregate addition of all these little…
On Recognition
The Mind of the Computer A Convolutional Neural Network learns to classify an image. What is the computer doing when it does this feat of ‘recognition’ ? Is it something we understand? Here is what we know. Digital images are submitted as inputs (grids of pixels, with RGB values, i.e., numbers). Then,…